Hmm,
Are you certain disk is an issue?
Regarding mmcache:
1) I'm setting mmcache.content, mmcache.keys and mmcache.sessions to 'disk'
2) mmcache.compress is set to 1, 1 on my machines
3) mmcache.shm_only is 0, 0 on my machines
Try this out, and see if it is the shm that is causing the hit. I
would be completely blown away if the filesystem access was an issue,
as even IDE systems can access disk faster than an anatomic
load/parse/compile for each script...
Try that, and we can go from there ;-)
-- Mitch